Hiking the Appalachian Trial This evocative phrase can mean anything done instead one's official duties. It also implies that you are skipping work to cry for days with your soul mate, in Argentina.

That Whole Sparking Thing What a wonderful euphemism for sleeping with that special someone who is, as far as your romantic partner knows, "just a friend"! That moment when you give up all pretense of innocent platonic friendship and just go for it is indeed a special time in the dissolution of every man's marriage.

Crossed Lines This is a splendid example of the art of digging yourself a deeper hole. Feel free to use it if you are trying to make your background sound sexy and exciting without having to admit to anything specific, or if you just want to be vague, once again, to your partner about your romantic history!

Only Dead Fish Go With the Flow This, apparently, is Christian dogwhistling, yes, but it is also a really great way to paint your complete abdication of your responsibilities as the proactive decision of a maverick. Only a dead fish would keep governing Alaska after two years on the job! A vibrant leader of tomorrow would buck the system and randomly quit for no good reason in the middle of her term! (Also: live fish swim both up and downstream, all the time, we are pretty sure.)

A Pattern of Generosity The John Ensign sex scandal has, thus far, not presented as many idiomatic gifts as the scandals of Palin and Sanford. But there are nuggets of gold. This phrase, our humble suggestion for a new euphemism, comes from Ensign's lawyer's statement on the payments made by Ensign to the husband of the woman he slept with for a year. In the letter, the lawyer claims the payments were made by Ensign's parents, out of the kindness of their own hearts, and not by Ensign himself, out of his campaign or Senate funds, acting on orders from Tom Coburn. So go ahead and say you bought those drugs or paid that woman to keep quiet as part of your long "pattern of generosity" next time you're caught possibly misusing funds!

Honorable mention: "The biggest self of self is self."
"I know that I know that I know"
"If I die, I die."

Voicemail is the old thing you push your phone buttons for to hear old voices from old people who leave you old messages about old things. Not very effective in your fast-paced youth lifestyle, is it? Well if you feel this way, join the big youthful club, okay. A Times freelancer has tracked down a bunch of people who share this opinion—probably by using fast-paced youth-friendly internet technology!

"If you left a message, I have to dial in, dial in my code," Ms. Cheong said. "Then I mess up and redial. Then once I hear the message, I need the phone number. I try to write it down, and then I have to rewind the message to hear it again," she added, feigning exhaustion.

I feel the same way! It seems that I'm not alone—everyone in my generation hates voices and loves "text," because we have seen our souls melted into goop and our entire selves transformed into antisocial swamp creatures by the internet's deadening glow. And I thought I was all alone. Thanks, fake NYT trend story of the week! Txt me! [NYT]

That result comes from a study by researchers at the University of Reading in the U.K. stretching back millennia. Their supercomputer predicts that "squeeze," "guts," and "stick" are likely to disappear from the language — thousands of years from now. Not a particularly useful result.

What we want to know: What are the ephemeral words disappearing now? Will Shortz, the New York Times crossword editor, appeared on the Simpsons last fall, prompting an elegy for words that had been dropped from the dictionary like "zounds" and "hootenanny." Today's technobabble will surely prove even more fleeting. We'll start by nominating "tweet," the noisome term Twitter users insist on for their 140-character text-message bleetings. Add your own in the comments.

Congressional Democrats are now banned from saying "stimulus," because it's a dumb Washington term no one likes, and because, as we all know, if they don't call it that it isn't that. Perception equals reality! (That was true of our entire financial system for many years, btw.)

Rahm Emanuel seems to have sent the memo out, and people are still adjusting. Nancy Pelosi almost said stimulus the other day! But then she caught herself: "We're not using the word 'stimulus,'" Nancy said at a press conference.

Of course, Democrats do have a legitimate excuse for giving their economic policies a new label: their economic policies are actually different!

Yet Democrats say the program will go far beyond a simple stimulus to a comprehensive approach that mixes tax policy, road and bridge building, alternative-energy projects and technological improvements that will have far-reaching consequences. It should not be equated, they say, with a program that provides eligible taxpayers with a check to cover a quick trip to the electronics store.

By the time Obama actually takes office, of course, his plans will be referred to as "Natural Economic Enhancement."

We haven't had a good, hopeful, vague name for a vast array of far-reaching policies lately, have we? A "New Deal" or a "Great Society" would really be useful right now, for historical framing purposes. This one should be called Project: Unicorn.

Kids have been sort of unimpressable for a while now, probably, but only recently has the idea of childhood become such a resoundingly cynical one. Markets are tested and groups are focused and everything's dangerous and sarcasm is now mistaken for cute, youthful willfulness. That 'meh' became the battle cry for this seen-it-all generation makes perfect sense; it's funny in its onomatopoeic nonsensicalness—it's like someone gave up halfway when trying to come up with a word. It's a bit sarcastic, just like kids like it, and it came from a pop culture touchstone. It worked its way up, in such a modern little cyber-organic way, through the school halls and internet chatting rooms and it's now in a big British book. It even beat out the über-popular Sex and the City term "frenemy," which was being considered too!

Maybe that means that a meh attitude isn't a path to slackerness and failure, but rather an alternative route to success! The meh sentiment demands a lot—impress me!, it yells. And maybe that's a good thing. Or, you know, whatever. Maybe not.

Who cares anyway.

Perpetual blog fodder actress Lindsay Lohan used the term on Access Hollywood recently when talking about Barack Obama. She was well intentioned, saying "It’s an amazing feeling. It’s our first colored president," but... yikes.

And then current James Bond actor Daniel Craig said that the world is ready for a "coloured" Bond now that Barry has taken the highest office in the land. We'd maybe expect this from old timers like Elaine Strich or the ghost of Charlton Heston, but coming from young Lindsay and Daniel? We expect more from a Sapphist and a limey, honestly.

Bad Clichés

Internets
Also "interweb," "interwebs," "series of tubes," and anything other than the actual word "internet." "Internets" was a throwaway joke in October 2004 and was tired by November. What are you, smug just for being familiar with the Internet? Just call it what it's called.

LOLspeak
I can has a break? The whole point of LOLspeak was that it's how cats talk (no lips! they can't say "have"), not how you talk. The LOLcats fad doesn't justify this refried version of forumspeak. (Unless you are me.)

Rule/suck
Use your words! Avoid hyperbole like "must die"

Uh, yeah.
Oh wow! You were surprised/offended/mystified by something on the Internet! Thank you for the value add.

Hat tip
Just thank people and don't pretend you have a fedora.

Why does this matter?
Bad as a comment (whose blog is it anyway?) and bad as a teaser in a post introduction. A writer should explain why it matters in the intro.

Dear x
Open letters are for ten-thousand-dollar full-page newspaper ads by people who couldn't plant a story through PR.

I'm so drunk/high/hungover
Equivalent to frat guys who brag about how fast they drove last night, after drinking how many beers and making out with what grade, 1 to 10, of chick.

Good Clichés!
Sad
Best used in the Gawker post "Sad Feist Must Now Sing For You." Will never get old. Same with "stupid," as in "Michael Bloomberg didn't want to run for stupid President anyway."

BREAKING EXCLUSIVE MUST CREDIT X
Still funny! Though a bit insidery. Discuss!

Lots of italics
A crutch, but a necessary one until rhymed meter makes a comeback and we can emphasize certain phrases using iambic pentameter.

"Gorno" isn't a journalist/gynecologist, "mobisode" isn't an episode of a television show relating to the mafia and "life-stream" isn't when you piss away your life savings. Other words like "multi-dad," "said of a woman who has children by more than one man," are superfluous. Mother told me that those women were hussies.

Save lolcat, I've never heard any of 2007's neologisms used. Oh, except that one time that guy on the subway who said, "My name is Raffael but my friends call me Rafi" began screaming, "I-reporter boom! Mom job, Navy shower, mom job! Make it rain! Nose bidet! Ninja Loan!" Who knew he was such a cutting edge linguist!

Problem was, all these serious students spelled their terms differently when they e-mailed Safire back. Dr. H. Samy Alim from UCLA, for instance, wrote it out as "hip-hop", explaining that the phrase Safire was asking after was "not just used in the temporal sense, like 'back in the days of Ronald Reagan, blacks was catchin' hell!'" but also in the personal/cultural sense.

But Dr. Geneva Smitherman, head of the Af-Am Language and Literacy Program at Michigan State and the author of "Black Talk," went a different route, forgoing the hyphen and maxing on the caps as she explained how "Hip Hop music" from smaller times "was more rooted in Black Cultural Consciousness, in contrast to the 1970s advent of 'gangsta rap' with its emphasis on violence, misogyny and bling-bling."

Meanwhile, professor Marcyliena Morgan from the Hip Hop Archive at Stanford threw a total curveball with her usage of "Hiphop" as one word, capitalized at the front and completely un-hyphenated.

Hip-hop, hiphop, Hip Hop, Hiphop... what was Safire to do? The copy-desk would surely force him to choose one and make corrections across the board, but he didn't want to offend anyone, or come off to the serious students as one of those linguistic imperialists he'd read about in the magazines. No, Safire thought, he wasn't going to let anyone make him into a monster. That's when he decided to put it all on the line, and "in the free spirit of the culture," "let everybody spell, capitalize or hyphenate this name any way they like."

"Hip copy editors," he warned, "will please hop off."

You go girl, indeed.